Mark writes about the confluence of people, place and memory. After growing up in the frigid Upper Midwest, Mark settled in the mossy Pacific Northwest.
Mark is working on a memoir about his experience as a gay Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, West Africa, in the late 80s.
Mark is seeking an agent for his memoir Why Are You Here?
Two days before he left for his assignment in Niger, West Africa in the fall of 1989, the Peace Corps told Mark that homosexuality was illegal there. It was a footnote, an aside. If you happen to be gay, program managers told the group of new volunteers not to act on it or you could be jailed and deported. In other words—Don’t Act, Don’t Tell.
Mark was a 22-year-old fledgling gay man with insatiable wanderlust, a newly minted anthropology degree and one foot out of the closet. He wanted to return to the idyllic sense of Africa he had experienced in Kenya years earlier. Only he wanted more realness, more grit and more challenge. He wanted a sojourn in the wilderness in order to figure out how to come out to his parents. He was mildly concerned about his liability as a gay man, but naively thought that he could keep to myself, live a simple life in the village and figure his shit out.
Only nothing worked out the way he expected.
Mark Lammers 